A wide variety of citrus juicers are known, including fully manual, fully automatic and motorized reamer varieties. In one known variety, a motorized reamer is supported by a housing. An inverted dome is carried by a simple pivoting arrangement and the dome is adapted to receive a half of a citrus fruit. The pivoting action of the dome brings the citrus half into contact with the rotating reamer. Continuous manual pressure against the dome squeezes the fruit against the reamer and the fruit's juice is thereby extracted and collected. In this arrangement, the movement of the inverted dome is generally an arc of a circle whose centre is defined by a simple hinge that connects the inverted dome to the housing.
This type of motion, by definition, creates uneven contact pressure between the citrus fruit and the reamer and therefore leaves portions of the fruit intact. Further this type of motion is susceptible to knocking the fruit from the top of the reamer before the fruit is fully encapsulated by the dome. The travel of the inverted dome can be made more linear if the pivot point is moved a significant distance from the dome, however this is generally not practical.
Further, the manual pressure required to bring the fruit into contact with the reamer does not benefit from a significant mechanical advantage. Therefore, the device is sometimes difficult to use particularly for persons with limited mobility, dexterity or strength.
Further, reamer design is important to the ease of use, efficiency and versatility of a citrus juicer. The reamer is intended to penetrate a half of a citrus fruit. Pressure between the fruit and reamer and relative rotation between the two results in the separation of the juice from the fruit. The exterior surface of the reamer normally carries ribs for the purpose of rupturing the juice sacks that are characteristic in citrus fruit.
Some juicers utilize the interior of a dome as a means of conveniently applying pressure to the exterior of the citrus fruit being juiced. Other juicers rely on hand pressure. In any event, a single prior art reamer has generally not been well adapted to the job of extracting juice from a wide variety of citrus fruit types. Reamers which are suitable for limes are rarely, if ever, suitable for larger oranges and grapefruits. Thus, prior art citrus presses are known to have interchangeable reamers.
Additionally, spouts are used on a variety of appliances. In preferred embodiments, juice that accumulates in a collector is dispensed through an opening to a spout that dispenses the collected juice into a container such as a drinking glass. Unless the opening in the juice collector can be sealed, the removal or interchange of a glass or the removal of the collector for cleaning or other purposes will result in undesirable leakage through the opening.
Forms of pivoting sealing spouts are known but each of the known prior art pivoting spouts requires the use of some form of resilient spring or detent mechanism or other mechanical complexity in order that the spout can be maintained in both a sealed and a dispensing position.